“God Loved (Part 1)”
By Brother Kenneth Ray
January 13th,
2013
Click here to download printable sermon
notes in pdf format.
Today
we’ll look and talk about our
relationship with Jesus Christ. There
are many areas in that relationship:
1)
How God loves us. 2)
How we love God 3)
How we can be a light to our family 4)
What kind of legacy do we leave—What do
people say about us? (or,
our
reputation—your reputation is what people know you by.
If you don’t do good work, people know that).
Over
the next couple of
Sundays—maybe—focus on one area of our relationship: How God loves us. This will help us to have
a better, purer,
more understandable, and clearer relationship with our God, with our
family,
with our circle of influence, with ourselves.
All of us have a circle of influence—I have two
dogs, so I know that I
at least influence them. This
will also
help you to understand how to have a better relationship with yourself.
The Bible says to draw closer to God,
actually the Bible says, “Draw nigh to God” (James 4:8). Now, if you’re like me,
you’ve heard it
before; this is not something new.
I’ve
heard that many times. It
sounds so
simple… Nothing is
as easy as it
looks. It is at the
core, the center,,
of what brings balance to our life and makes us the Christian that God
wants us
to be (notice I said the Christian that God
wants us to be. There’s
the Christian
that I want to be, and then there’s
the Christian that God wants me to
be. When I have a
proper relationship
with God, it helps me to be the Christian He wants me to be.
Let’s look at how God loves us.
1
John 4:10
Herein is love, not that we loved God, but
that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Propitiation
is atonement, a
means of appeasing. Herein
is love, that
God sent His Son, to be the atonement, or appeasement for our sins. Any time (or maybe every
time) that we study
God’s love, we must understand that it is unconditional, there are no
strings
attached to God’s love. If
you root for
the ‘right’ football team, He will not love you more.
If you’re from a certain state—you know,
everyone seems to live in God’s country…
I lived in Montana—God’s Country.
I lived in Southern California—God’s Country. I thought it was all God’s
Country, personally—but
there are no strings attached; God’s love is unconditional. You may think, “How can I
get God to like me
more? How can I
earn God’s love?” I’m
going to tell it to you as simple, and as
plain as it can get: God
loves you. You
can’t do anything to make Him love you
more and there’s nothing you can do to make Him love you less. He unconditionally loves
you, regardless of
where you’re from or what you’ve done, who you root for, what your
status is,
God loves poor, middle-class, and rich people unconditionally. Now, return on investment,
that’s a different
story, and we’re not going to talk about that today.
That’s it; God loves you and He loved both you
and me before we loved Him. So
many look
back at their lives and say, “Me?” Yes, you (some of us have a life
where the sin-factor
is greater than others). I’m
not saying
that’s a bad thing; I’m just saying that it is.
Because you may have that in your life—you may have
a life that has more
sin in it than someone else’s—and you may think, because of that, that
there is
no way God could love you as much as someone who didn’t do all that
stuff. There’s no
way; I’ve hurt Him too bad. He
loves you, unconditionally, the same.
We, as people, will not love you the same,
unconditionally, but the Bible says that His ways are not our ways
(Isaiah
55:8), and we prove that every day.
What
about the people on death row? There
are
always people who want to say, well, what about those people? The Bible tells about, “Do
you think those
people are worse sinners?” and it goes on to say, “No, but except you
repent.” (Luke
13:4-5). But there
are people on Death
Row, deservedly so, and guess what? God
loves them, yes, even them, because He does not put conditions on how
much He
loves them. How can
God love this
murderer? You’ve
heard about the
shooting in that movie theater, and the shooting of those young
children in
that school—How can God love that person?
Because, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but
that he loved us,
and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
All of them.
We all know John 3:16; we see those signs held up at
football games, “For
God so loved the world…” and you notice that there are no
qualifications in
that. That was
everybody.
God loves all of us; we are His
creation. God’s
unconditional love is
hard to define. John
chose not to define
it but to give an example of it in 1 John 4:10.
Let’s look at some other examples of God’s love: First, Jesus on the
cross—just before His
physical body died on the cross.
Luke
23:33-34
…they crucified him, and the
malefactors…
So here is Christ placed between two
people who very much deserved to be where they were; they had done one
thing
that made them worthy of crucifixion.
Here
is our savior in between two men that were worthy, and He was not
worthy; He
did nothing wrong, so why was He there? Why?
because He loves us. That’s
unconditional love. He
didn’t deserve to
be there; who was He taking the fall for? It
wasn’t the angels. It wasn’t the Holy
Ghost. That narrows
it down to us,
mankind. Because He
loved us, and
because it was unconditional—you’ve got to remember, He’d already wiped
the
world out once, with the great flood, Noh and the ark, and then we
started over
again. Jesus,
because of His
unconditional love, looked down and saw how we were, and He was willing
to go
to the cross, for us. He
said, “Father,
forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Question: Why
did Jesus choose to
talk to His Father out loud? Why
didn’t
He say that with His inner voice?
Why
did He say it out loud, so that people could hear it?
Because in His final hour, with His final
strength, Jesus was teaching us a lesson ( or the
lesson) about who He
came to save. Jesus
came to save
sinners. When he
spoke out, He was
teaching that.
Anyone
every not get their way and cry, “That’s
not fair.”? If
Jesus had been just and if
Jesus had been fair, we would not have Him, wanting to go on the cross. Instead of receiving His
love,
unconditionally; we would receive condemnation, because condemnation is
our
just reward. Who
did He come to save?
sinners.
Romans
6:23 For
the wages of sin is death; but the gift
of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
You can’t just pray for it, you can’t
just accept it in your heart, you can’t just send money to the
televangelist,
you can’t buy a book; it says through
Jesus Christ our Lord. How’d
that
happen? It says on
that cross, because of
unconditional love, regardless of our actions.
Jesus is telling us that He came to save sinners,
that means you, that
means me, that means our neighbors, the greater Waukegan area,
Louisiana, the
North, South, East and West, the guy that runs the joint, everyone. You see, the Roman
soldiers were owed legal
wages according to their work, and their agreement with Rome. If a Roman soldier was not
paid, then whoever
was in charge of paying them would get in serious trouble because they
broke
the agreement that they had. If
we were truly
to get paid, according to our worth, according to what the Word tells
us, it
wouldn’t be Heaven; it would not be forgiveness, it would be
condemnation. We
are not paid that way, that’s why we call
it Grace. That is
why it is called Grace. I
get paid every two weeks, for being an
electrician. I have
a time sheet, I
punch in, and my boss, he looks at it, and he has these jobs that he
gives us,
and according to those work packages, he charges them time for that,
and then
we get paid, according to the jobs that we got done.
Because the wages of sin is death—and I’m
full of it (Romans 3:23)—but, because I’m not
paid that way, it’s the grace of God, and that unconditional love, that
I
receive.
I’m going to say something, and
you’ll need to listen fully: The
only
condition of God’s love being active in your life is that you accept it. What about repentance? What about baptism? What about take up your
cross? These are
all real things, and worthy of
study—worthy of obedience—but, the only condition for God’s love to be
active
in your life is to accept it. If
you
look at all of those other things, they require us to be active in
something,
it does not require something to be active in us.
That something must first be active in us
that we may react to it. If you don’t accept God’s
love, do you think
that you’ll ever get to the point of repentance or baptism or taking up
your
cross? There’s
always a pre-
everything. The
only condition for God’s
love to be active in your life is for you to accept it.
I don’t need you to be baptized in Jesus’ name
for God’s love to be active in your life.
Now, once God’s love is active in your life, it will
cause other things
to happen. I didn’t
say that they only
thing you need to do to be saved is to accept it, I said the only
condition for
God’s love to be active in your
life is
for you to accept it.
Hebrews
12:2 …for the joy
that was set before him endured
the cross, despising the shame…
Why does God refer to the sacrifice
of His Son as a joy? Anybody ever try to lose weight?
Isn’t that a sacrifice?
Do you count that sacrifice as a joy? I count
the results as joy, but not the sacrifice.
Ever try to give up a food that you like for health
reasons? It’s
usually not something that you don’t like eating, it’s something that
you have
way too much of. “Hallelujah,
I can’t
eat prime rib anymore!” So,
why does God
refer to the sacrifice of His Son as a joy? Nails in His hands and
feet, thorns
in His brow, they whipped Him, stuck a spear in His side (well,
granted, He was
gone by the time they stuck the spear in His side), it wasn’t a treat. Jesus willingly did that,
and God said that
it was a joy. I
don’t serve an insane
God, but, with our human understanding, you would think, “That’s nuts!” If I came to you and said,
“I’m going to kill
your kid, painfully, and you’re going to have joy in that,” you’d be
thinking, “Yeah
(sarcastically).” Even
though it cost
the life of His Son, God was glad to be reconciled to us again. God loved us so much that
He took joy in the
shame, He took joy in the pain, because our sins were now forgiven. The Holiest of Holies—that
curtain was rent. We
didn’t have access to that close of a
relationship with God until Jesus gave up the ghost for our sins. Who could go in there? Only one guy; the high
priest. And even he
had to be squeaky clean, or they
wouldn’t hear the bells any more, and they would have to pull him out. So now, because of one
guy, Jesus Christ, we
are able to have a closer relationship and soon, church, a face-to-face
relationship.
Next week we will conclude with part
two of “God Loved.” This
week, I want you
to work on meeting the only condition to have God’s love active in your
life: accept it.
Sermon notes by Pete Shepherd
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